I shot some footage with a 7D. Have my actor inside a car with the green screen lit well. I shot my plates of the road with the same camera. I'm able to use premier cs5 to composite the shots. With a few small tweaks it looks great and plays fine on the timeline. Footage is apple pro res 422 and I'm keeping the same codec when I export to quicktime. When I view the export however, some of the shots have flashes of white and grey specs. Video plays and lloks fine before I export. Can anyone offer advice? Thank you!

Thanks for the reply...To be more specific, this is for an indy feature film. These are driving scenes. I shot the actor in the car from 3 angles with green propperly lit outside the windows. I originally edited the movie in FCP before I had premiere. Hence the pro res codec. I exported the driving scenes to composite the chroma key shots in premiere because it seems to do a better job than FCP. The film will be sumbitted to festivals and used to generate the interest of investors for future projects. The annoying thing is that the footage looks great on the timeline. This is my first time editng chroma key footage. I'm trying to get this movie done and this little annoyance is holding me up Any suggestions? Thank you!

Unfortunately, there are many things that can go wrong while exporting. Or for that matter, while watching the export.

Since you started on FCP I will assume you are still on a Mac. If it looks good on the timeline, then the rest should be simple settings issues. So that's good.

Exactly what are you exporting to? Does it match the sequence 100%? Same codec, same frame size, same frame rate? Are you maximizing the all of the quality settings?

If this footage will be used in another program to be edited further, you need the highest quality you can get. If it is to be played on a computer, that is a different issue. So, when you say that it has flashes of white and grey specs, what are you using to view the export? Quicktime? Or are you importing it back into Premiere Pro so you can look at it frame by frame to detect the problems?

I am sorry that I have more questions than anwers, but perhaps if I ask the right questions, the answers will presnt themselves to you.

The footage in the sequence is Apple pro res 422, 1920x1080, 24p..(which is actually 23.976) I'm using CS5 and there's a preset sequence setting for canon dslr. I use this setting all the time and never had a problem with exports until this chroma key work. In the "export" box I simple use the apple pro res 422 setting and keep the size the same as the sequence 1920x1080. Should I not use quicktime? Are there other settings that I'm missing? Since the bulk of the project is sitting in FCP, I'm going to export these clips and simply drop them back in the FCP timeline. Then export the entire movie.

If you were on a PC I would say avoid Quicktime, but on a Mac it is the appropriate wrapper as far as I can tell.

So, if I understand you correctly, when you export out of Premiere Pro and import into FCP, you have problems. Right?

Have you tried importing into Premiere Pro and looking at it frame by frame to see if Premiere Pro sees flashes? And if you do the same with FCP do you see the problem, or is it only during full speed playback?

I haven't imported into FCP. These specific composite scenes are the only scenes edited in CS5. The rest of the movie was edited in FCP. Because I can't directly import into FCP from CS5, I'm exporting the composite scenes as quicktime files (apple pro res 422), then I'm going to drag those clips into the FCP timeline to complete my movie. I have not got that far however bevause when I export to quicktime and watch the clips, I'm getting that static going on. Grey and white speckles. I need to fix the problem before I drage the clips into the FCP timeline. If I look at it fram by frame in Premiere Pro and it looks fine

I either didn't fully understand your answer or I may not have been clear with my question. Permit me to try again. Also, please forgive me if these questions are too basic and you have gone way past this level of testing already.

If the exported composite scene looks good in Premiere Pro, and you export to a Quicktime file using Apple Pro Res 422, could it be that the problem is with the way that the Quicktime player shows it to you?

If you take the exported file, import it into Premiere Pro, does that look OK? I am not sure if you meant it looks OK in Premiere Pro before you export it, or after you reimport it.

I understand that you want to fix the problem before importing it into FCP, but how about if you open a new project in FCP and import into that? How does it look then?

What I am attempting to convey is that sometimes the test is harder than the actual requirements. Play the video in FCP. Export from FCP. Make sure that the problem is real or just a player problem.

Ok. I re-did the composite work from scratch using FCP's chroma keyer. I exported and noticed a simmilar issue but not as bad as the premiere version. Out of curiousity, I played around with the controls in FCP's chroma key. Tried to minimize the paramaters of certain controls. (saturation, smoothing, luma etc.) I exported and the video was perfect. I then went back to the version I composited in Premiere. I played around with the Ultra Key controls and the problem got better after exporting. I concluded that the problem in both editing systems was a result of the settings. I was able to completely clean the video up in FCP but to my surprise I was not able to completely clean the video up in Premiere. It got better but not 100%. Until now I never bothered using the Chroma Key function in FCP because I was told it wasn't that good. FCP gave me the results I needed. I still think Premiere is an awesome editing sytem and will still use it but not the Ultra Key. If you have any advice to get better results with Premiere's Ultra key please share it. Thank you for your help!